The real guest of honor was New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who had been invited by the wind farm operator, Dong Energy, to visit the installation, which is not unlike something that Mr. Bloomberg and other New York officials are contemplating for the waters south of Queens.

But that project — like every other offshore wind venture in the United States to date — is by no means guaranteed. As I write in an article just posted at nytimes.com, not a single offshore wind turbine has been built in the United States.

Europe, China and Japan, meanwhile, are far along in developing a water-based wind power industry.

As you might guess, the United States is behind for many reasons: economic and regulatory uncertainties, local opposition, and even the relative bounty of cheaper land-based wind power resources have all conspired to slow any drive to develop wind power resources on the sea. The beleaguered Cape Wind project, which has been struggling to overcome these obstacles for the better part of a decade and now awaits a decision from the Interior Department, is seen as a bellwether for the industry.

Given the hurdles, some industry watchers have begun to wonder if Canada might build North America’s first offshore wind farm.

“Canada is actually in a pretty good place right now,” said Matthew Kaplan, a senior analyst with Emerging Energy Research, a market research firm based in Cambridge, Mass. Mr. Kaplan pointed to the generous incentives for renewable energy development that provincial leaders in Ontario put in place last fall.

This month the Ontario Power Authority announced that it had, in just a few months after introducing the increased incentives, awarded contracts worth $8 billion for development of some 2,500 megawatts of new renewable energy projects — or roughly the capacity of two midsized nuclear power plants.

The Wall Street Journal noted last week that both sides of the Great Lakes are ripe for wind power development — but whether Windstream, Cape Wind or some other developer will prove to be the first to get an offshore project up and running on this continent remains anybody’s guess.

Given the complexities of building and financing offshore wind farms, it’s also likely to be a while before wind turbines become a common site in North American waters.

Indeed, Jim Kourtoff, the chief executive of Trillium Power Wind, another Canadian developer pursuing a project at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, called claims by various project developers that they will have offshore wind farms up and running in the next year or so “rubbish.”

“I think that you’re probably not going to find anything until late 2012,” Mr. Kourtoff said. “There’s too much one-upsmanship in the industry,” he added. “Who’s going to be first? I really don’t care. What’s important is getting this industry off the ground.”

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How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.